Before Darkness Fell

By

Karen Wilkin

Updated March 18, 2013 6:54 p.m. ET

New York

German Expressionism 1900-1930: Masterpieces From the Neue Galerie Collection

Neue Galerie Through April 22

A little more than 11 years ago, the Neue Galerie, the Upper East Side's "museum for German and Austrian art," opened in its elegantly renovated mansion on the corner of 86th Street and Fifth Avenue. The inaugural exhibition was a celebration of the museum's paintings, drawings, prints, furniture and decorative arts, a sumptuous collection carefully assembled by the founders, Serge Sabarsky and Ronald S. Lauder. Austrian works were on the grand main floor, with its elaborate turn-of-the-last-century décor; German works, including Bauhaus furniture, on the sleek upper floor. It was a staggering assembly of superb examples by the leading practitioners from about 1900 to the 1940s, a concentration and a show of the museum's wealth not fully repeated since then.

ENLARGE

'Self-Portrait With Horn' (1938), one of Max Beckmann's best.
Neue Galerie New York and Private Collection

Now "German Expressionism 1900-1930: Masterpieces From the Neue Galerie Collection" allows us, once again, to revel in at least some of the riches of this small, fascinating institution. Thanks to the depth of the various collections, the installation comes pretty close to being an ideal overview, admittedly in miniature, of the most significant moments in the history of adventurous German art before National Socialism declared such adventurousness to be "degenerate."

The most celebrated German modernists of the early years of the 20th century, those associated with the vanguard groups the Brücke and the Blaue Reiter, are well represented, including Erich Heckel,Vasily Kandinsky,Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc,Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In their work, the competing influences of Fauvism's brilliant color and Cubism's angular geometry are combined in various ways to suggest intense feeling, even violence. Unlike their French colleagues, the Germans used simplifications of drawing and intensification of hue not simply to enlarge the formal possibilities of image making. Their desire to evoke the "primitive" and, therefore, the "authentic," was as much—perhaps even more—a challenge to the constraints of bourgeois society as a challenge to traditional aesthetic values.

At the start of the installation, Heckel's superheated, reclining adolescent nude with a doll, from 1910, confronts a full-throttle Murnau streetscape by Kandinsky from 1908; the Heckel is more overtly raw, but the Kandinsky is a harbinger of abstractness yet to come, with color threatening to exist independently of reference. Nearby, a lean, angular Schmidt-Rottluff nude from 1914 awkwardly folds herself into a schematic landscape, as if aspiring to become one of the Demoiselles d'Avignon, while a jagged Kirchner streetscape, 1912-14, offers yet another creative transformation of Cubist notions. There are, as well, fine examples by less familiar but significant artists of the period, such as a delightful, Matisse-inflected portrait of Kandinsky in an interior, c. 1912, by his companion Gabriele Münter, and a sturdy, brilliantly hued Max Pechstein, c. 1910. And that's just in the first gallery.

If we can tear ourselves away from this crash course in daring German painting before World War I, the next gallery expands the narrative to give us some of the back story. Witness a freely painted, searching portrait, made in 1912, by Lovis Corinth, a generation older than the artists of the Brücke and the Blaue Reiter, but a kind of precursor, especially in the urgent works—like the Neue Galerie's portrait—that he painted after a debilitating stroke in 1911. We also get the sequel, in the aftermath of World War I, in the form of kinky, carefully wrought "New Objectivity" paintings from the 1920s. Riotous color gives way to subdued hues and seamless modeling, in works such as Christian Schad's meticulously rendered naughty girls, George Grosz's spiky indictments of a deteriorating society, Otto Dix's blowsy nudes, and his just plain scary portrait of a celebrated lawyer, exaggerated aquiline features livid above his stiff collar, against a snowy cityscape.

Everything in this gallery pales, however, beside one of the absolute best of Max Beckmann's many self-portraits, painted in 1938. The brooding artist presents himself in a pink-and-black striped robe, holding a horn high, as if to play it. The looping curves of the bell and body of the instrument are made to rhyme with Beckmann's balding bullet head; his shadowed, sidelong glance propels our gaze along the chain of interlocking circles to the abrupt, vermilion edge of the canvas. Stripes and fingers continue the rhyme scheme. The whole is unified by Beckmann's faultless sense of just how much dry, brushy pigment will animate every part of the picture. The self-portrait was a star of the inaugural exhibition and hasn't been seen enough since.

Anything after that might be a little anticlimactic, but the last large gallery provides a capsule view of the Bauhaus, with furniture by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van de Rohe, and paintings by Paul Klee,Oskar Schlemmer and Lyonel Feininger, among others, along with the occasional poster. Gaps in the narrative are filled by a fine selection of drawings and prints by the artists represented elsewhere in the show. Among the standouts: a dark, brooding Corinth self-portrait drawing and a charming, light-struck August Macke of an Arab on a donkey.

Many of the outstanding works in the current exhibit were also in the inaugural exhibition; some are new. All of them remind us just what a treasure the Neue Galerie is.

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